- Removal of the IPv6 requirement to receive Pv4 addresses from the RIPE NCC
- Related wording adjustments in the title, summary and rationale of the proposal
I do not agree with this proposal.
Let me explain that with a simple case: Our company is a LIR for
just a few month now; the main reason why we signed up on April this
year was that we started to run out of IP addresses and wanted to
get that /22 IPv4 allocation (we already had a /24). And for us the
only reason to deploy IPv6 was that we had to request an allocation
in the first place.
In our case we are a software company and we provide hosting
services only for our existing customers and for our own software;
therefore, the additional /22 IPv4 allocation that we received is
suitable to expand our business and still have enough IPv4 address
space for a long time. So, actually, we don't need IPv6 yet; and the
chances are quite high that if we did not had to request the IPv6
allocation we would still be living happily with IPv4 only.
Everyone who decided to deploy IPv6 will automatically inform
others. A lot of our customers didn't even know that IPv6 exists; so
they need other companies to inform them why they need it and why
they should be concerned about it. Additionally we noticed that
selling IPv6 is not even for our upstream providers a common
process. They are capable of providing IPv6 and generally it works
quite fine; however, there is a slight difference between anyone
who's keen to sell his company's services and anyone who's fine with
selling services if the customer is willing to pay for it. And from
my experience the first one applies to IPv4 and the second one to
IPv6.
There are about 1000 new LIRs per year; if only this new LIRs would
have to request an IPv6 allocation I believe that a lot of them
would want to have this IPv6 allocation set up an running even if
it's only because they've received it (as it was the case for our
company). And the same applies to any existing LIR requesting their
last /22.
From my point of view, the removal of the IPv6 requirement would
slow down the process of deploying IPv6; the more everyone is
talking about IPv6 to customers as well as to other providers
(especially upstream providers) the more public awareness of IPv6
increases and the more selling and buying IPv6 services goes without
saying - and that's what we need.